This chapter details this book’s theoretical contribution. It develops the notion of mobilizational citizenship, which synthesizes an innovative framework that explains how and why mobilization endures over time in highly inhospitable conditions at the urban margins. This framework’s conceptualization of citizenship goes beyond traditional, liberal approaches. It relies on a more flexible and informal notion of political incorporation, which depends on the ways in which collectives build their identity and rescale community-building beyond the framework of the nation-state. In other words, it captures an alternative type of politicization that is often neglected in studies of collective action. Mobilizational citizenship involves the dynamic interaction between four components: agentic memory, mobilizing belonging, mobilizing boundaries, and decentralized protagonism. The chapter’s framework also outlines the barriers to mobilization in the urban margins. It explains how political institutions regularly withdraw and control political capital within urban communities in the aim of demobilizing them. When mobilizational citizenship fails to develop, local dwellers engage in political capital hoarding dynamics within their neighborhoods, which further deactivates collective action.

This chapter focuses on the case of Lo Hermida, a neighborhood in which mobilization has endured since Chile’s democratic transition. The chapter explains how memory-building prepares the ground for the emergence of mobilizational citizenship in Chile’s urban margins. It begins by delivering a historical account of how radical movements socialized young urban dwellers in some neighborhoods during the anti-dictatorial protests in the 1980s. This contextual information is key to understanding the development of mobilizational citizenship in Chile’s urban margins. By providing political training to neighborhood dwellers, radical groups and parties on the left ensured historical continuity between the present construction of identity and the past, pre-coup insurgent project of mobilization at the urban margins. The chapter then explores how activists develop agency in the present through memory-building. This is accomplished by using memories of successful collective action to performatively subvert oppressive past events. The chapter shows how activists carry out this subversion through their interactions, idealizations of past radical groups, and repertoires of contention.

This introductory chapter describes Chile’s recent and unprecedented wave of protests starting in late 2019 to situate this book within a broader socio-political context and academic debate. The book’s core contribution is the notion of mobilizational citizenship, which adds to the literature on social movements and citizenship studies. It explains how and why communities at the urban margins are able to sustain collective action over several decades and become prepared to support large-scale protests leading to a democratization process. To develop this theoretical argument, this book tells the story of two very similar urban communities founded in eastern Santiago in 1970. They have a similar socio-demographic configuration and location, their histories coincide, and grew as highly politicized and mobilized communities. Remarkably however, while one of the communities followed the pattern of demobilization observed across the country in the wake of its transition to democracy, the other is a counterexample of enduring mobilization. I studied this puzzling contrast through an ethnographic approach that included observations, interviews, and archival research.

In a world in which civil society actors and their defiance of the institutional status quo are more prominent than ever, the scholarship on social movements has not provided enough insight into the mobilization of highly excluded groups. This concluding chapter synthesizes the novel framework produced in this book, called mobilizational citizenship, to explain how collective action survives over time in the urban margins under highly unfavorable conditions. This research involved examining how urban contentious politics and local organizing can endure with minimal influence from elite actors or political opportunities. The analytical components of mobilizational citizenship can be used to explain collective action in cases of Latin America beyond Chile’s urban margins, such as the enduring community organizing of El Alto, in Bolivia, the leftist territorial organizations of Villa El Salvador, in Peru, or the Piquetero Movement organizations still mobilizing in neighborhoods of Argentina. This book’s framework could also travel beyond Latin America to analyze movements that spread leadership and have strong collective identities, such as Black Lives Matter, the White Power Movement, and Extinction Rebellion.

This chapter explains how activists in the urban margins decentralize protagonism to transform a mobilizing collective identity into citizenship-building. It uses Gamson’s typology of micromobilizing acts to analyze their face-to-face interactions within three types of encounters: organizing, divesting, and reframing acts. Based on interviews and observations, it shows how activists conceive their collective identity of mobilization as political capital and consequently strategize to diffuse it. In other words, the activists teach each other the identity symbols and values that both promote and validate collective action locally. Within the local social movement community, political capital usually flows from informal leaders to younger, less experienced activists and potential challengers. This socialization process progressively certifies young local activists as community-builders, both individually and collectively. It also makes it more likely for individual leaders to be replaced by others once they decide to quit their role. In turn, this decentralization of protagonism promotes citizenship-building and enduring mobilization, thus creating mobilizational citizenship.

This chapter begins the book’s comparative ethnographic enquiry. While the scholarship has advanced several explanations for the post-authoritarian deactivation of the underprivileged across Latin American cities, little is known about the trajectories by which mobilization survives in some neighborhoods and not in others. This chapter focuses on the case of Nuevo Amanecer to better grasp the mechanisms that led to the demise of collective action in post-dictatorial urban Chile. It describes how party activists belonging to the Alianza Democrática developed a managerial leadership style in many underprivileged neighborhoods when coordinating anti-dictatorial protests in the 1980s. The relationships these moderate political activists fostered with neighborhood dwellers throughout the decade often evolved into networks of political loyalty after the democratic transition. These networks are current and ongoing. To feed their political loyalty networks, community leaders learn to insistently monopolize political capital at the grassroots level. This dynamic has further prevented mobilizational citizenship from developing. It also fragments población spaces, deactivates local initiatives of governance, and depoliticizes the youth.

This chapter discusses the ways in which collective identity fuels mobilization in Chile’s urban margins. It looks at how activists’ cohesiveness and their differentiation from other social actors produce a mobilizing identity that advances contentious politics. The chapter draws on participant observations and interviews to outline the contents and dynamics of political consciousness production in Santiago’s urban margins. In their interactions, activists wield discourses of informality and marginality to strengthen a sense of pride in their neighborhood that is immune to hegemonic narratives of stigmatization. The thick boundaries that local activists use to promote mobilization depend on them dynamically differentiating between two realms of collective experience: the formal and the informal. On the one hand, the informal represents the protected sphere of confidence and close connections within neighborhood organizations. Activism works as a way of keeping the informal alive. The formal, on the other hand, is seen as a threat that motivates protective collective action. Finally, the chapter shows how activists’ reactive and defensive mobilization generates a sense of self-determination.

This chapter describes the historical backdrop against which mobilizational citizenship developed in Chile’s urban margins from the 1960s onward. It offers parallel accounts of developments across Chile’s urban margins, as well as in the communities used as case studies in this book: the Lo Hermida and Nuevo Amanecer neighborhoods. While descriptive in nature, the chapter makes several key steps. First, it addresses key moments of collective action occurring in underprivileged urban communities before the coup d’état in 1973. Second, the chapter describes the powerfully disruptive impact of the dictatorship in communities at the urban margins. Third, it chronicles the wave of anti-dictatorship protests that occurred in the 1980s. Fourth, the chapter describes the dynamics of mobilization and civil society in poblaciones after the democratic transition in 1990. Since the early 2000s, an increasing number of social groups have been demonstrating over social rights in Chile and highly disruptive, large-scale protests erupted in late 2019. The chapter demonstrates the responsiveness of active communities in the urban margins and shows how they provided the organizational structure requisite for protest diffusion.